convolvatron

5 ms·

1.
by convolvatron 5d ago
the lab I was at got on this train right around the beginning of the sparc architecture. yellow pages. nfs based swap, nfs based boot. 10Mbit thinnet. we suffered for a few months and then moved to xterms for the cheap seats (which was a mu
2.
by convolvatron 6d ago
no one bothered to clone Sherline. Cheap mini mills and lathes that were the same cost, but were made out of actual castings and used more standard tools totally undercut Sherline.
3.
by convolvatron 6d ago
the sherline designs aren't particularly notable, and they're pretty easy to replicate if you have working machine tools that are larger. any machinist could make a sherline mill or lathe, but without that floorspace and capex and
4.
by convolvatron 7d ago
actually large programs that are persistent is where you really care. kernels and databases often use explicit allocators because there is so much policy wrapped up in allocation. this goes back decades, its not just a feature of the 2020s.
5.
by convolvatron 8d ago
I'm anti IP in theory and practice. If this results in undermining vengeful protection of the Annas and the Aarons of the world, I'm all for it. But it's not, is it. If the corpus and the models were all free, that would be l
6.
by convolvatron 10d ago
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
7.
by convolvatron 11d ago
Im mildly confused as well, there is an even more immediate shortcut that I've certainly implemented before. in arp its not unusual to to just create a ip->mac binding from the source information in the ethernet header. where this p
8.
by convolvatron 11d ago
oh. I'm talking about authoring OS and boot loaders from an absolute blank slate. like starting from the world where you toggled them in from switches, and later by burning proms
9.
by convolvatron 11d ago
until very recently you couldn't even do OS development without a boot loader, so asserting that that would be the last thing you would write is just nonsensical
10.
by convolvatron 11d ago
in the bad olden times you definitely started to write your operating system for your new computer from the first instruction executed upwards. it wasn't at all common to have a comprehensive virtualization/simulation environment.
11.
by convolvatron 11d ago
I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack. for example we could completely ob
12.
by convolvatron 12d ago
general issues aside, for me one of the issues with emacs is that for historical reasons there is a cut between elisp and C that's really high up and pretty ragged. ideally a large composable lisp project like emacs would have a very a
13.
by convolvatron 12d ago
yes, it can be easier to have a central serializer for events, but that certainly makes things problematic for fault tolerance and basically excludes large-scale solutions. using an agreed-upon post-hoc ordering based on timestamps is certa
14.
by convolvatron 12d ago
fwiw I think it would reduce a lot of friction for the end user and probably increase utilization quite a bit. my new take on this problem is to arrange that shared resources are dynamically associated with your environment, rather than bei
15.
by convolvatron 13d ago
to me the goal of having 'ps' show everything in the cluster is kind of cute at best. but yes, right now you install all kinds of services and support nodes, and distributed filesystems, and orchestration tools and software manage
16.
by convolvatron 13d ago
I did a research SSI in the early 2000s. After getting it largely to work, we kind of put it aside. Why would we aspire to using 'ps' and 'ls' and 'mount' and such to manage our large scale systems? surely ther
17.
by convolvatron 13d ago
I don't think the neuro-symbolic model is going to dumb anything down at all. Cyc didn't end up producing anything useful, but the only reason an llm is able to do math at all is that it can keep throwing stuff at lean all day. pe
18.
by convolvatron 14d ago
I think the point is even stronger. alignment is really not very well defined, nor are the mechanisms used to provide it. from what I understand it's more of a statistically imposed bias than an impenetrable gate. personally I would li
19.
by convolvatron 14d ago
my only argument here is that there isn't really any reason to avoid going through an emissions review if required. or to require that scrubbers be installed if necessary. the decision to just make an exception to the process for datac
20.
by convolvatron 14d ago
idk where you've been but the standard for AI datacenters buildouts right now is power-plant size turbine operations up to 1GW in size. not 2KVA Honda generators. notably they are single cycle and not combined cycle used in actual plan
21.
by convolvatron 15d ago
no, we already abolished all rule making and review about CO2, this is removing the EPA requirement to install scrubbers for removal of NO and NO2 given sufficiently large outputs, which cause acid rain and are linked to respiratory problem
22.
by convolvatron 16d ago
wow. that's really quite backwards. the more money you raise and the more money you want, the bigger the story you have to tell. apparently after 1T you've got to raise the stakes to extinction level event.
23.
by convolvatron 16d ago
I struggled a little bit reading this. but I think your point is valid. if we are actually advancing the field then we should just be unconditionally happy. ignoring the attribution issue, there is a real concern that the process of math ha
24.
by convolvatron 18d ago
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total
25.
by convolvatron 19d ago
the fact that traditional database infrastructure handles many people's needs doesn't really obviate dataflow style architectures. personally I think (3) composition is a real potential win. I would also note that streaming is a r
26.
by convolvatron 19d ago
there is a couple good arguments that alternative front ends open up competition. the first is that since people only see the front end, then augmenting that with additional backends is lower friction. the other is that since network effect
27.
by convolvatron 22d ago
it certainly seems to be. if it were just a matter of noise, or discharging contaminated water, or waste gasses we're supposed to have rules for these things. any facility that does these things is supposed to adhere to them. so the is
28.
by convolvatron 22d ago
two doors down from my shop is an antique bently restorer. he's sold a few, but he still has 5 frames that he's working on. after all the custom panel and interior work and chasing after the few remaining parts available in all ki
29.
by convolvatron 22d ago
ok, so we managed to get a decision that the president wan't immune from having to pay out in a civil suit related to the molestation of a woman from before he even became a politician. but part of the problem here is the blurring of t
30.
by convolvatron 22d ago
its substantially worse than that. anytime anyone uses the word 'scale' without even saying what kind of scaling they mean is guilty of eroding the discourse. at this point I don't think we should even be talking about scalin

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